The First Data Release From Air France 447's Black Boxes

Later this week, French aviation authorities will release the first information from the flight data recorders of Air France Flight 447. But rumors about the contents of the reports are already swirling. PM contributor Jeff Wise, who wrote our cover story about the possible causes of the 2009 crash, checks out whether those rumors are consistent with what's known about the wreck.

By
Jeff Wise

Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images

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Back in 2009, when PM reported on the early stages of the investigation into the crash of Air France's doomed Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic en route from Rio de Janiero to Paris, the earliest facts about its demise were just coming to light. With recordings of automated maintenance messages broadcast by the plane's computers and from scraps of floating wreckage and human remains, France's civil aircraft investigators pieced together preliminary guesses as to what might have gone wrong. But now, with the flight data recorders found at last, we may be on the cusp of knowing for sure what happened up there on that fateful day.

This Friday, May 27, France's civil aviation authority, the BEA, will issue a preliminary "factual statement" about the flight data recorders. A fuller report will follow in July.

Rumors about the contents of the report are already swirling. This past Sunday, the German magazine Der Spiegel quoted anonymous sources close to the investigation. They said the flight data recorders showed that shortly after the plane's airspeed sensors failed due to ice buildup, the plane began a steep ascent. The magazine also reported that the plane did not encounter extraordinary turbulence, and that the captain was away from the cockpit when the crisis unfolded.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal added details from other unnamed sources, claiming that the co-pilots who were flying the aircraft failed to follow the proper procedures to maintain correct attitude and engine settings when their indicators failed. According to that report, multiple system failures set off such a cascade of warning signals and alarms that the flight crew was unable to prioritize the necessary steps to save the plane.

Amid the whispers and allegations, what do we really know right now?

First, it has already been established that the likely triggers for the accident were faulty airspeed sensors called pitot tubes, which iced up when the plane encountered an area of thunderstorms. The pitot tube model on the Airbus 330 had failed multiple times before in similar circumstances, and Air France had already ordered and received replacement units by the time of the accident, but had not yet installed them. And reports that alarms and warnings overwhelmed the flight crew are consistent with the automatic maintenance transmissions that the plane sent before crashing, which indicated a cascade of multiple failures. But what's not fair at this time is to assign blame based on unsubstantiated reports from unnamed sources.

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And the key questions remain unanswered. When the pilots lost control, did they go too slow and stall, or go too fast and exceed the plane's critical Mach number, which would cause the plane to violently pitch nose-down and plunge downward? If either occurred, would it have been possible for them to recover? As PM reported back in 2009, it's probable that if the flight crew fought too vigorously to regain control, they could have torn the airframe apart. On the other hand, some experts who examined the aircraft wreckage say the airplane was intact when it hit the surface. The pilots may even have been trying to carry out a controlled ditching (a water landing).

Hopefully, the information necessary to settle these mysteries awaits within the black boxes. We'll start to find out more on Friday.

Jeff Wise is a contributing editor for Popular Mechanics and the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. For a daily dose of extreme fear, check out his blog.